Technologies that utilize boiling have been essential in our daily lives whether it be in simple cooking devices or in power plants providing the majority of the world's electricity today. For decades, boiling research has primarily focused on static enhancements to surfaces and fluids by modifying wettability: the ability of liquids to spread on a surface, which is a behavior strongly linked to how easily bubbles can be generated. Typically, modifications either lower wettability (the ability of a liquid to spread on a surface) to create more bubbles and improve efficiency, or increase wettability to suppress bubble generation and maximize heat transfer Thus, boilers are typically designed for specific purposes with limited versatility.
Boiling is an energy intensive liquid to vapor phase change process that provides immense utility in a large portion of industrial and domestic applications. During boiling, bubbles nucleate from a solid-liquid interface and grow adhered to the surface by surface tension until external buoyancy and convection force them to depart from the surface. In pool boiling, no bulk movement of fluid is applied, and buoyancy is primarily involved in bubble departure.
For a given surface and fluid combination, the heat flux, q″, is related to the wall superheat (difference between the surface temperature and boiling point), TWall−Tsat, according to a boiling curve. At any point along the curve, a heat transfer coefficient (HTC), hboil, is defined as
                              h          boil                =                              q            ″                                              T              wall                        -                          T              sat                                                          (        1        )            
As the superheat increases, bubble nucleation increases until the critical heat flux (CHF) is reached. At the CHF, which is typically on the order of 100 W cm−2 for water, coalescence of bubbles at the surface causes a vapor film to form that impedes the heat transfer. In this case, the heat transfer coefficient is lowered significantly due to a dramatic rise in temperature, which can be catastrophic. Consequently, maximizing the CHF is a common goal for boiling enhancement and is typically achieved by incorporating surface roughness with high wettability. This allows the liquid to easily rewet the surface after bubble departure, preventing bubble coalescence. However, highly wetting behavior suppresses nucleation compared to a non-wettable surface. The link between nucleation and wettability has been distinctly observed and explained. Thus, superheats are typically larger for highly wetting surfaces, which is non-ideal from an HTC and energy efficiency standpoint. Efforts to increase HTC include incorporating roughness and low wetting materials in order to promote nucleation. Adding surfactants, which are molecules with hydrophobic and hydrophilic components, at low concentrations have also increased the HTC consistent with decreased wettability. This result can be attributed to solid-liquid adsorption of additives, rendering the surface less wettable, which promotes nucleation, before dynamic liquid-vapor surface tension effects become apparent and increase wetting. Even with theses surface and fluid modifications, however, the behavior of the boiler is fundamentally the same: a static system where performance is locked to a fixed boiling curve.